Case Study: Tructyre Improved Service Level by 32% With Peopleware

Tructyre specializes in tyre sales and maintenance services for commercial vehicles: trucks, trailers, buses, and coaches. Its value proposition is “de-risking Britain’s fleets”, saving haulage firms money, increasing vehicle uptime, and optimizing tyre mileage and fuel consumption.

Based in Gateshead in the North East of England, Tructyre’s Customer Experience Center handles calls, emails, and job tickets. There is also a back office operation, processing documents such as invoices. Tructyre is a 24/7/365 operation.

Jonathan O’Connor is the Resource Planning Manager at Tructyre. He is a seasoned workforce planner and planning leader with experience in the energy, telecommunications, leisure, transportation and finance sectors.

Challenges

When Tructyre implemented Peopleware, they transformed service quality in just five weeks – improving service level by 32% and schedule adherence by 14%, while boosting employee engagement and reducing operational cost.

Building on that momentum, Peopleware and Tructyre were also recently shortlisted as finalists in the Forum Partnership Awards, reflecting the power and impact of their collaborative approach.

The next challenge Tructyre faced was ambitious and clear: reduce weekly hours from 40 to 37.5 to improve work–life balance, without increasing staff or sacrificing service levels.

Solution

When Tructyre set out to transform their workforce management, they didn’t start from scratch; they already had the right system in place: Peopleware.

But Tructyre wanted to transition from a 40-hour to a 37.5-hour week to support a better balance while maintaining productivity and cost efficiency.

To make this a success, Tructyre needed to do more than simply tweak a few schedules. They needed to unlock the full potential of their existing system. That’s where the partnership with Peopleware came into its own.

Collaborating closely with Peopleware’s team, the focus was to support new contractual hours and promote a more flexible, employee-centric approach. This involved adapting key features such as shift planning, forecasting, and automated break management.

One of the biggest enablers was Peopleware’s flexibility behind the scenes. Tructyre used a dedicated test environment within the Peopleware platform to model and simulate the new working patterns, without disrupting live operations or alerting staff. This gave the team space to answer critical questions upfront:

• Can the new hours work in practice?
• Will service levels hold?
• What’s the true cost of change?

By using the dedicated test environment, Jonathan O’Connor was able to test various scenarios, comparing forecasted workload with scheduled coverage and actual staffing levels. This revealed whether the new model would lead to over- or understaffing and how it would affect performance.

Jonathan presented his findings to leadership, proving that the new hours could be implemented with no loss in performance, no need for extra staff, and no additional costs.

With management fully on board, the shift became a reality. Thanks to the groundwork already laid in Peopleware, the new schedule rolled out instantly and seamlessly across the organization.

The test scenario was promoted directly into the live system, replacing the old 40-hour schedules with the newly optimized 37.5-hour ones.

The change was immediate and, for the agents, a welcome surprise. There were no pay cuts, no disruption, just fewer hours and the same great service.

"Employee reaction was overwhelmingly positive. What had once been a rigid, high-pressure environment was transformed into one where flexibility, fairness, and balance came first." – Jonathan O’Connor.

Results

Beyond employee morale, the business impact was just as impressive. Tructyre’s invoice backlog, which had once peaked at 11,000, dropped to 7,000 within a few months. Two years later, it sits at under 3,000, just three days’ worth of work for a business that processes up to 900 jobs per day.

Employee satisfaction followed the same upward trend, with scores rising from 42 in 2023 to 71 in 2024, driven by improvements in scheduling, communication, and control over working hours.

The change also created personal opportunities. For Jonathan, a more predictable workload allowed him to pursue a Level 4 Data Analyst apprenticeship, a milestone that would’ve been impossible before. It’s a clear sign that the transformation went beyond business KPIs. It was about investing in people.

With a proven model in place, Tructyre is now expanding its success across the wider business. Their sister company, ATS, has begun using the optimized Peopleware set-up with its night shift team. If results continue to match expectations, full adoption across ATS is on the horizon.

Tructyre’s story is one many organizations can relate to: the desire to do more for employees without sacrificing performance.

This case proves that having the right partner, one who listens, adapts, and empowers you to get the most from what you already have, is often the key to creating meaningful change.